“What makes someone Asian?” In Kogonada’s 2021 film After Yang, an Asian-looking android babysitter Yang curiously questions. Not envying humanness anymore but Asianness, Yang is a deviant representation of Asian robots/robotic Asians that have decorated many SF imaginations. For many filmic representations of Asian robotic figures, there has been no afterlife: they are fascinating and intimidating when alive but lose their enchanting liveliness once they are stripped of their humanly ornaments, exposing their superficiality. In contrast, After Yang forthrightly discusses the posteriority of robotic Asian by investigating its graceful interior. Uncalloused and un-callous, Yang’s soft-skinned and soft-hearted body-mind reverses the stereotypical (Techno-)Orientalist “little yellow man”—indifferent to pain and emotion, docile yet obdurate, and nothing but a shell. Unlike Alexander Weinstein’s original short story, the film’s postmortem concludes that Yang contains a vast universe full of exquisite memories.
This paper starts with this alluring portrayal of Asian robot. After Yang responds to the piercing interrogation of yellowness—“What makes someone Asian?”—with a beautifully blunt answer, leaving more questions to be answered. What needs to be changed when a Korean-born American director redeems an Asian robot story from a white author’s hands? What has to be erased and to remain to prove that this Asian robot also possesses solid interiority as same as—or even better than—“human?” Starting with these questions, this paper will first interrogate how After Yang canonizes an Asian-looking android nanny as a transhuman Buddha, and then how this inversive movement falls back into the enduring lineage of Saidian Orientalism, which is now evolving into Techno-Orientalism and Asian futurism.